


Over and Over Again.

by phosphorous



Series: Haikyuu One-shot Collection | Multiple Universes [5]
Category: Haikyuu!!
Genre: Alternate Universe - Dystopia, Alternate Universe - Soulmate Identifying Marks, And Oh My God They Weren't Soulmates, But They Still Loved Each Other, Despite The Government Trying To Make Them Forget, Gen, Internal Monologues, Journals, M/M, Non-Linear Narrative
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-03-08
Updated: 2020-03-08
Packaged: 2021-02-28 20:02:05
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,884
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23072893
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/phosphorous/pseuds/phosphorous
Summary: Alternatively: the soulmate system is absolute. When you fall in love with someone who isn't your soulmate, the government gives you time to leave each other before the system reprograms you and makes you forget the person you were in love with.Seven years ago, Iwaizumi Hajime fell in love with his best friend. Seven years later, he finds a journal written by himself before he was reprogrammed. It takes a rainy day, plastic stars, a beige coat and an umbrella patterned with teddy bears for them to meet again.
Relationships: Iwaizumi Hajime/Oikawa Tooru
Series: Haikyuu One-shot Collection | Multiple Universes [5]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1579000
Comments: 36
Kudos: 204





	Over and Over Again.

_ texas is a landlocked state, _

_ it’s a little bit far away, _

_ from the water;  _

_ from the home that i’ve wanted to make _

…... ****

Hajime wakes up on the twentieth of August feeling distinctly like he’s forgetting something. He opens his eyes to a dreary, colorless ceiling scattered with plastic glow-in-the-dark stars that are broken in some places and bent in others, wonders when he put those up, and realizes that it feels, strangely, like there’s a void in his heart that he can’t recall feeling the day before.

Plastic stars. Dreary ceiling. Cold, burning air. It’s the middle of the night and there’s a sick, hollow silence in the room. He’s freezing from the tips of his fingers to the marrow of his bones. Everything except for the stars is the same as it was the night before -- his books, stacked neatly in a row on the desk by the open window along with his pens and highlighters. A godzilla toy sitting slumped over on his anatomy textbook. The jackets still slung on the chair and his shirts crumpled on the rug. He wonders why it unsettles him as much as it does. 

There’s a click as a broken half of a plastic star comes hurtling down and lands on the side of his face. Hajime shrugs it off and stands to get a drink of tea to help him fall asleep again.

In the kitchen, there’s a beige coat slung over one of the chairs that doesn’t look like Hajime’s. He picks it up, figures that Kuroo was leaving his stuff everywhere again, and busies himself with making tea. His knuckles brush against the second mug in the cupboard, one with a drawing of an astronaut attempting to climb the moon with a rope on it, and he wonders where that came from. It didn’t look like something he’d own. It almost looked like something that would belong to --

_ Oikawa.  _

The vision comes back to him like the sharp edge of a paring knife digging into his skin: there’s a man standing in front of what seems to be a library. His hair is the color of the hardwood in Hajime’s apartment and his glasses are askew on his face. When he turns, the beige coat on his shoulders flutters behind him like a cape. He reaches out and says, “Iwa-chan, you’re late!”

Then the vision cuts. Hajime looks down and finds that he’s linked fingers with the man in the beige coat and that they’re somewhere else, somewhere with the night sky so vast and broad that it seems to cover them like a dome above their heads. The man in the beige coat turns to him and asks, “Hey, you’re happy, aren’t you?”

The scene cuts. The man in the beige coat splays one of his hands over the side of Hajime’s face, his touch there and cold and familiar though Hajime has no recollection of it, his thumb pressed on the corner of Hajime’s mouth and his eyes warm and real even though he clearly wasn’t. It feels, strangely, like he’s been here before. The man in the beige coat grins and says, “I’ll race you back home,” before promptly turning on his heel and running away, his laughter tinkling like bells in the air. 

It’s only when the world starts whirling around him that he realizes he’s running behind him, trying to catch up, and Hajime realizes, with a start, that he’s laughing too, and that he’s been here before. 

Plastic stars. Dreary ceiling. Cold, burning air. 

The mug with the drawing of an astronaut using a rope to climb the moon. 

The beige coat on the dining room chair.

Hajime has no recollection of any of those things because they aren’t  _ his _ . They belong to Oikawa, the man in the beige coat who clearly  _ knew  _ Hajime, just like Hajime knew him.

He comes back with a start, when the mug he’s holding, his own, thankfully, slips from the crook of his fingers and collides against the floor. When he looks back up, he’s in his kitchen, there’s no sign of the night sky high above his head and no sign of the beige coat, and he realizes, with a start, that the timer on his wrist is still running. 

Hajime has yet to meet his soulmate. 

“Then who are you?” Hajime murmurs, and he’s thinking of the man in the beige coat named Oikawa again. 

As expected, there’s no reply. Just the ticking of his timer, barely muffled in the tense air around him. 

….

_ it somehow in the city _

_ you make it there _

_ and you make it  _

_ anywhere, anywhere _

….

Hajime finds the journal stuck in a box in his attic, hidden between the stuff he’d brought from home. It’s worn out and looks like it has seen better days. There’s a coffee stain on the cover and a few pages fall out when Hajime shifts the book until it’s resting on its spine. When he wipes out the cover using the sleeve of his shirt, he finds, in neat cursive, his own name and the date from the twentieth of August, seven years ago. He’d have been seventeen back then. 

He flips open to the first age. In his own handwriting, choppy and ugly and worse than a grade schooler’s, it reads:  _ if you’re reading this, then Oikawa’s probably gone, and you must have forgotten him. _

The man in the beige coat. Hajime’s heart drops, skidding against the side of his ribcage like a monster come alive.

When he flips the pages, his heart seems to completely stop. 

It was  _ him _ . Hajime had written this journal all the way from the twentieth of August seven years ago. It’s all recording little things about Oikawa. That he played volleyball, that he liked listening to 70s disco while cooking eggs, that his hand was just a little bigger than Hajime’s, that he always smiled first thing in the morning, that he had a horrible bedhead and a drowsy voice and that he liked to sing in the shower. At the end of each entry, Hajime had written:  _ they’ll make you forget him one day, but you won’t. You love him too much to forget.  _

Oikawa likes stargazing and alien movies and slow-dancing in the kitchen. He doesn’t like marinated eggs and the color orange and wants to go to Hong Kong one day. He’d been the first one to say  _ I love you  _ between the two of them and his favorite flower is the sunflower. Hajime’s favorite thing seven years ago was listening to him talk as he fell asleep.

In the later years, most of the entries begin like this:  _ Today, it took me thirty seven minutes to remember Oikawa. It took him thirty six to remember me.  _

Hajime had been in  _ love  _ with this man once, so much that he’d written entries into a journal about the things that he loved about him the most. So much that he  _ knew  _ he’d forget and still wrote in the diary everyday so he’d remember later, so much that he knew he wanted to remember him even after he was made to forget.

It feels, strangely, like the spaces in his lungs are far too big for the air in the room. 

They weren’t soulmates. Hajime’s timer still working meant as much. 

But he had loved him once, and he’d been made to forget that love along with the boy who had made him feel all that like it meant  _ nothing _ .

He shuts the book, leaves it back in the box, and closes his eyes as he leans against the wall behind his head. The sunlight filters into the room and his shadow spills over the book. 

_ You don’t even know him,  _ he tells himself.

_ Oh, but you do,  _ a traitorous part of his disloyal heart says, and a part of him, lonely and broken, wonders why he had to forget in the first place.

…..

_ but i’ve been anywhere _

_ and it’s not what i want _

_ i wanna still be  _

_ with you. _

….

It’s raining. 

Hajime is carrying an umbrella printed with teddy bears. According to the journal, it belongs to Oikawa. ( _ We leave things at each other’s houses, just in case we forget. _ ) His own umbrella is a solid grey with a black handle. It must be in Oikawa’s house now, wherever that was. It’s far too cold for him to even think about much, anyway. 

It’s the twenty seventh of September and Hajime’s timer is still ticking. He still thinks about Oikawa everytime he opens his eyes and sees the plastic stars falling apart on his ceiling.

_ (He stuck those up for you. We were twenty and he thought that it’d help you settle in faster if you wouldn’t miss him as much. “A constellation for you, and a constellation for me,” he always said, whenever you got too down about not seeing him often. _

_ He thought of you all the time. When they make you forget, you must think of him. He’s the only one for you.) _

The rain stops when Hajime is standing across from the crosswalk, waiting for the light to turn green. He’s closing his umbrella and drearily eyeing the sky when he realizes that he’s being stared at.

And it’s  _ him _ .

Beige coat. Big, broad shoulders. Wide, chocolate colored eyes behind crooked glasses, knuckles turning white around the handle of the solid grey umbrella. Artfully tousled brown hair. There’s a beat of silence, like he’s frozen in time, and then his lips move.

He says, “Iwa-chan,” and Hajime doesn’t hear it because the world is roaring to life around him. 

( _ He’s stupid, and he’s irresponsible, but he’s got the kind of pretty face that radiates warmth, and when you see him, you’ll know. He’s beautiful, isn’t he? _ )

In the hand that’s not occupied, there’s a journal exactly like the one shoved into a box in Hajime’s house.

The timer on his wrist is still ticking. 

Hajime crosses the road with shaking hands and tired feet. He’s so nervous that it feels like he’s about to stop breathing any second, and he realizes, with a start, that Oikawa looks just as scared and nervous as he is. 

He walks up to him.

“This might sound crazy,” he starts, and maybe it’s the rain, or maybe it’s the fact that Oikawa is watching him like he can’t believe this is real, or maybe it’s the fact that the rain droplets clinging onto the edges of Oikawa’s eyelashes make him look like he’s crying pearls, but his voice cracks. He swallows and speaks again. “But do you think  **_—_ ** have we met before?”

There’s no more rain. Just the dull sunlight that comes after, and a sky dotted with grey clouds that seem to be disappearing with every passing second.

“Yeah,” Oikawa chokes out. He’s wearing beige, and it’s very much the voice that asked Hajime,  _ hey, you’re happy, aren’t you _ under the sky full of stars and whispered  _ I love you, stay with me, always  _ against the hollow of his throat that speaks back to him. He’s clutching onto the book like it’s his lifeline and the tear that runs down his cheek glints in the sunshine after the rain like a diamond under pressure. “Yeah, I think we have.”

**Author's Note:**

> twitter: odasakusa


End file.
